Echo
by the bonesinger of yme-loc
Summary: A close or parallel imitation or repetition of another: repercussion; vestige. I can hear the hollow of the walls around us all, and they are fragile. There are things without that want to come within. [The story of Alice Shepard, Alliance Navy. Retelling and re-imagining of Mass Effect. Rated M because the games were M, and I don't intend to skimp.]
1. Chapter 00: Without Context

There's fingers in her head, sinking strange talons into the soft meat of her brain, prying apart the dense tissue and thumbing through her memories like pages in a book. It's visceral, gut-wrenching: not memory but experience, not recollection but reliving, and it's like she's a passenger in her own life, watching helplessly from the back seat as this thing sorts through her soul like it's so much chaff.

It passes over her childhood, it lingers on moments she'd rather let lie, it forces her through the experiences again. It's like a bored child, pulling legs off a bug: thoughtless cruelty just to watch it squirm. She wants to cry, she wants to scream - she wants to die, but more and more she's forgetting why and where and how and everything that matters. The context. It's slipping away in a haze of green-tinged fog and devouring her with her own existence. Played back.

* * *

In a shaken hand, the course of her life changes. She is at a reception, after the concluding talk of the week-long symposium. All around her is a sea of uniforms and reflective medals, suits and ties and hor d'oeuvres. She is sipping from a flute of champagne, indulging one of the rare times she could be both in uniform and drink. The final day of a endless talks and presentations, all focusing on the future of biotics in the military, with an emphasis on special forces and the elite N7 group. Which, of course, was why she is here. She runs a finger down the N7 stripe on her dress jacket, red piping looping around her left shoulder. One of the few things in her life she is truly proud of, after enough time had tempered the memories of the grueling months of near-starvation and endless physical strain from 'hellish' to 'respectable'. The crowd of admirals and generals, businessmen and attachés moves and pulses around her, but she is undisturbed. Perhaps one of the lowest ranked officers there, even her fame is overlooked in this assemblage of the movers and shakers of the Alliance.

'Commander Shepard?' The voice is familiar. A man emerges from the crowd: brown hair cropped short matched by bright brown eyes surrounded by the now-familiar wrinkles and hollows that picked out a biotic. Kaidan. He snaps a salute, crisp and professional. Shifting the flute to her left, she returns it, and he joins her at the standing table, a smile breaking the plane of his face. He's the kind of person where it lights up his eyes, like his body forgets for a second the parasite implant crouching at the base of his brainstem. In another life, she might just have found it cute, but he is a Lieutenant and she a Commander. In his wake is another man, and she notices the rank insignia on his dress coat.

'Captain!'. This time she is the one to come to attention, but the dark-skinned officer waves it away.

'At ease, Commander. I'm David Anderson.' He pauses, and looks her up and down. For the briefest of moments she is like a specimen under scrutiny, but the Captain nods nearly imperceptibly and holds out a hand. Whatever it was he was looking for, he found it. She takes it, feeling the time-weathered skin, the calloused fingers.

'How would you like to make history?'

* * *

 _It's seeing and it's watching and it's learning so it pushes deeper, eases into her more, stirs the pot and watches the bloom of mud burst up from the stagnant pool of memory as_

* * *

she eyes the leaves, trying to figure out if they'd kill her or not. Like everything else on this godforsaken rock, it's definitely Earth-stock, because thirty short years ago the dense moon was only a dust ball, but at this point, she's fairly certain everything is a test.

The fact that not a single fruit or nut bearing plant was introduced here adds to her paranoia.

If they were on Earth, maybe she could rustle up a handful of half-ripe blackberries, tart and bitter and enough to pinch her eyes shut for a second, but something to eat nonetheless. Walnuts maybe, pecans. Or maybe even kill a squirrel and eat that raw. But this is not Earth, and there are no fruit, and no animals here. Just basic vegetation and enough insect life to keep it struggling along.

Fuck it, she thinks, and strips off a handful of the pulpy leaves, wads them up, and stuffs the mushy ball in her mouth. It tastes like chlorophyll and watery dirt and it sticks into her molars and the fuzzy undersides rake her gums.

But it scratches that primal part of her brain and it's something in the stomach, something that holds off the constant, ravenous gnaw. She'd heard stories about a guy eating the leather straps off his pack, and at this point, it sounds pretty likely.

She works another fistful of leaves into her mouth, knowing it probably will do nothing and also give her the shits, before rolling onto her back and looking up at the sky. Lying like this, spread eagle, as limp as possible, it was almost possible to forget the gravity-and-a-half of this fucking place. Every second that feels like she has asthma: always out of breath, always tired. Like there is a demon on her back, and she has to give it a horsie ride around for weeks. Always being pulled down, drawn down by exhaustion and hunger and shaking arms and legs and barely able to focus.

There are seventeen of them left, each one of them mean enough to chew bullets and piss fire, and she'll be goddamned if she flunks out now. N7 is so close. So close! N7, not N1, not N2, not even N5 where most people plateaued, but _N7_.

* * *

There's more batarians than she can count, more than she can imagine - it's like the fucking Hegemony emptied itself all over Elysium. The irony of the paradise world's name is cruel, at this moment. On every street there's a slaver, above every house there's a gunship, it seems. There's even a cruiser, hanging in the sky above the city, ugly and patchwork compared to the sleek lines she knows in the Alliance. Everywhere there's scream, shouts, howls of pain and the snap-crack discharge of stun webs.

Shepard has her Predator. She had her Predator, a loose blue blouse, tan slacks, a leather belt and military issue underwear. That's all she has. That's all there is, and she's hiding behind the counter in a cafe, surrounded by pebbles of glass, pools of warming smoothies and slushies. It wouldn't be hard to vanish. It wouldn't be. It's been a year since N certification, but it's like it was yesterday. She can vanish, melt away into the urban warrens and bunker down and wait for the Alliance to show. A day, at most. A day. A city like this? Even before N, even before the Alliance, she could read a place like this like the back of her hand, and guess out nooks and crannies and the best places to skip out where the heat couldn't find her, the best places to stash, the best places to drop a body.

But she's hearing her voice. She's hearing the words she spoke so recently, the words she spoke with her hands on her gun.

I swear to uphold the Articles of Alliance, to protect and defend every innocent life with even the sacrifice of my own.

* * *

 _Now it is seeing her, moving through her and around her, observing and experiencing and shaping, its rippling through her life and she's feeling things change behind it, watching confused because hey, wait, it didn't happen that way, I don't remember -_

* * *

The rain leaves little runnels as it cascades down the glass. It is a strange rain, a rain without wind or thunder, just a gentle darkening of the 'sky' and a sudden downpour. Weather aboard Arcturus station, within the torus, is always odd.

She's letting it distract her, give her time to consider an answer. David Anderson is sitting next to her, hands folded calmly in his lap. The other occupant is Admiral Steven Hackett, perhaps the most decorated and well-known man in the Alliance, if not all of human space.

'It's a lot to think about, Shepard. You don't need to make a decision immediately. This right here-' Hackett holds up a folded sheet of paper between two fingers, and slides it across the polished surface of his desk. Real wood. Only the best for Arcturus.

'This is a pass for seven days of paid leave. There's also a note in there from me, giving you free passage on any Alliance vessel. Go back to Earth if you want, go to Bekenstein, go to Eden Prime. There's another note in there with a number on it. Give it to any hotel and the Alliance foots the bill. And I mean any, Shepard.' The admiral leans back in his ergonomic chair, a weird design of panels and crossbars that flexes and moves with him like a living creature.

'In case it's not obvious, we're very serious about this. I've got authorization from the highest levels to give you pretty much anything. Leasing out a dreadnought might be a bit too much, but I think I could swing a cruiser.' He's got a half-grin, strange on his scarred face. Shepard knows his story - he's as famous as she. Moreso: because he's a name that was made and has stayed. A spacer from birth, working his way up the ranks in the fledgling Alliance. Nearly dying in the act of saving a crashing mass conveyor, saving all three thousand souls on board at the cost of his own picket ship and half his crew. From enlisted to the man at the top, Hackett was already a legend before she was born, one that even Alice Shepard might never compare to.

So it's a little unsettling to have him offering her the world on a platter.

'That's not really necessary, Admiral. I wouldn't know what to do with myself with a week off.'

'I've heard the rumors, Shepard. That your COs have trouble enough getting rid of you just for the weekends.'

Anderson laughs, shaking his head. 'Shepard, if you don't take the offer, I'll order you to. The Navy is giving you an all expenses paid vacation anywhere. Go see Olympus Mons, or rent a low-orbit condo over Bekenstein.' The Captain and the Admiral share a look. 'It's like God himself offering you heaven and Earth and you say 'Can't I just get back to work?' She forces a smile to go along with the sort of easy camaraderie Anderson and Hackett clearly enjoy. It's distinctly a third-wheel feeling, sitting in a chair in front of living legend and his close associate.

'That's not what I meant, Captain. I mean, I won't need the week. I'll do it, Admiral.' In one motion she leans forward, propelling herself out of the chair with her hands on the armrests, feeling the two men's eyes on her as she paces. Inside, she's jumpy, twitching behind the collarbone with anxiety that's almost a stranger to feel. She has to pace, or she might forget how to talk.

'The Alliance has given me a life, and if this is how I can repay it...then it's not a question.'

'It's not a question of payment, Shepard. Taking on the role of Council Spectre will change your life in ways I can't even imagine. You'd be the only human in the organization. I want to know that you want this, not that you feel obligated to take it.'

She's at the window, and she presses palms to the chrome railing that runs at waist length, almost touching her nose to the window. Runnels of water course down the glass, obscuring and revealing the horizon that bends upwards. Hackett's not wrong; taking this on means leaving everything behind. Even her commission would be suspended indefinitely, officially making her no longer part of the Systems Alliance Navy. Only her citizenship would still pick her out as a member of the fast growing multinational organization, but that is tiny in the face of everything she would be giving up. Everything she had earned and clawed for in the past decade, from Akuze to Elysium to Torfan. Through the weeks of N qualification, as she watched her own body slowly consume itself, skin drawing tight over bones.

More than that - it was leaving behind the security that the Alliance gave her. The security of certainty, of a clear-cut set of rules she could order her life by. When to wake up, when to sleep, where to go, how to talk, how to dress. How to hold herself and salute and speak and nod and command and listen and how to become a cog inside of a much, much larger machine where she became just one of many. She would be leaving that order, that guidance all behind her.

Shepard just wasn't sure what she would be without it. She knew what she was before it, but what could come after?

Once before had she changed everything in her life, because in that moment the choice was change or die.

Without such a black and white choice…

But what did she have, really? What was there to remain for? A continual holding pattern of waiting for some kind of point to living to show up and punch her in the face, and say 'Hey, here I was, all along'?

'I want this, Admiral.' Her body is still betraying the calmness she feels, or tries to convince herself she feels; muscles in her chest twitching and jumping and clenching, hands shaking even as she clasps them behind her back and turns to face the room again. She can't tell him why she wants it, so she tells him what he'll accept.

'I can do more good for the Alliance as a Spectre than I can as a Commander. And I want that, sir. I grew up on Earth, I know what the Alliance is doing for humanity. So don't make me have to think about this. I know already.'

Hackett is nodding, slow, thoughtfully. He knows her history, or he thinks he does, and she knows her words will mesh with his expectations. It's part of the mythology of Shepard, the girl from Earth, the orphan from the streets who just wants to make the world a better place.

Maybe it's not really true. Maybe if enough people believe it, it can find it's own kind of truth.

Either way, Hackett accepts it, and she sees Anderson does too.

The Admiral stands, and again, a smile pulls at the unscarred half of his face. She's never seen Hackett smile before in any holos, and she thinks he's probably doing it on purpose. To make this all seem more personable and intimate. Anderson stays seated, and she notices. There's a lot of history between the Captain and the Admiral.

'Then, Commander, thank you for your service. And you're still going on that leave.'

* * *

 _'Lieutenant Shepard! We are cut off from the shuttles, and they're blowing the airlocks behind us! I've got men with suit ruptures - we have got to pull back-!'_ She hears gunfire through the open channel, but it's drowned out by that around her. He's got men with suit ruptures? Half her platoon was _open-A_ too but the only way out was through.

'Captain, I can't leave this position. They're filling in behind us faster than we can kill them. We've got to keep going.'

 _'Shepard, there is nothing for us here! This goddamn moon is a deathtrap!'_

'Sir, God himself could order me to retreat but I can't follow an order that isn't possible! There's at least two hundred batarians behind us and more keep coming. If they want us deeper in this rock, then they're going to get that wish.'

* * *

The ship dominates the graving dock at Arcturus like no other she has ever seen. It actually makes her pause in her step, slowing just a fraction, enough that Anderson outpaces her and looks back.

'She has that effect on people, Shepard.' There's mirth in his tone, and Shepard gets the feeling he was waiting for this.

It's not that it's a fine looking vessel. She's never had a particular interest in the aesthetics of spacecraft, as long as they were a: Alliance and b: tough enough to get here where she needed to be.

It's that it has intention.

It is hanging in an electromagnetic cradle, enormous clamps locked onto its wings, holding it aloft against the artificial gravity of the torus station. From it's razor nose to the flared engine casings and swept wings, the ship screams it's purpose to the world. It's a hunter, a killer, a ruthless shark in the pelagic expanse of the void. It's finish is black, matte black, and the overhead lights are swallowed by it. There is no reflection, no soft glow of illumination bouncing back off of its curved hull. All is pulled in and swallowed by this ship, miserly in revealing any secret.

It devours her gaze, sucking in her attention like it swallows up the light, and it reminds her of no other ship she has seen.

It's because she sees herself in the nonreflective surfaces.

She's a hunter too.

Anderson clears his throat and brings her back to the world.

'Sorry, Captain. It's impressive. She doesn't look like any other ship I've ever served on.' With the pride of a man talking about his child or that of a Commander speaking of his ship (which is to say, one and the same) Anderson tells her about it's birth.

'It's because she's not like any other ship in the Alliance. She's the _Normandy_ , the first ship designed and built by human and aliens working together. Half of her is from the Turian Hierarchy, the other half from the Alliance. But she's all parts deadly and like nothing else. A stealth ship, Shepard. That's not paint, it's a composite compound made just for the Normandy. Absorbs about eighty-five percent of all visible light, and closer to ninety-five percent of radiation. It means she's got heatsinks bigger than a dreadnought's, but when she goes silent...she's a ghost. And only God can find her.'

'Your command, sir?'

'For now. I think Steven - Admiral Hackett - doesn't want me that far from Arcturus. We'll see.'

'You two are close.' She's feeling out her newfound status, as not-quite Navy and not-quite civilian. For the duration of her Spectre evaluation, her rank is suspended and officially, she's no longer part of the Alliance Navy. Now she's a kind of private citizen/political appointee. So she asks questions she'd never ask, thinks things she normally would put away.

Like how Anderson and Hackett are on a first name basis.

'We go pretty far back. And, well, I was you, once.' For the second time in as many minutes, Shepard is thrown for a moment.

'Like me - you were going to be a Spectre?'

'Went through everything you did. Well, I didn't get the all expense paid offer to tour the Alliance. You'll have to tell me how that went.' She waves it away, but she knows Anderson is joking. 'I didn't pass the evaluation, but that's not important. Admiral Hackett put himself on the line for me, to bring me back into the Navy after. I owe him a lot.'

'I think we all do, sir.'

'Call me David, Shepard. I'm not your Captain anymore, and you're not a Commander.'

'How about 'Anderson'?' There's only so much she can take, and a first name basis with Captain Anderson, best buds with Admiral Hackett, is far beyond that.

'I can live with that,' he says, shrugging.

'Show me your ship then, Anderson.' He gestures toward the long gangway, a standard stamped metal walkway supported by thin wires that is entirely at odds with the sleek design of the ship it nestles up to.

'Right this way.'

* * *

Her Vindicator is still blaring it's overheat alarm, and it probably will stay that way forever. The damn thing just can't cool down, not anymore, not in the hot tunnels and not after she'd slammed it against the rocky walls hard enough to dent the casing. She's down to her Predator, standard issue sidearm and, of course, her combat knife. Matte black and razor edged, virtually unchanged over the centuries of war. Already it had proven itself, jamming in between plates of batarian armor, puncturing clean through their hardsuits to dig for the person inside. Her right thigh is decorated with horizontal streaks of blue blood, now starting to overlap as she wipes the blade clean and clean again -

* * *

and Lazy wipes across her chest again, top to bottom, clavicle to belly-button and she clenches her toes. The buzzing changes pitch every time he pulls back to admire his handiwork, comparing it to the sketches she gave him. There's a mirror, chipped about the edges, rust working into the finish, and she can look up at it and see her chest reflected back in it, swiped with ink and some blood.

'It's looking good, yeah?' He asks, and looks up at her, grins, two teeth shining in the hissing, naked wire light.

'Yeah, good. I'm liking.' And she is - it's just like she imagined, right there, big and proud and spreading from clavicle to sternum and creeping a little onto each breast. Big and wide and bright and it's something no one else in the Reds has. Lazy Lazi has the steadiest hand of anyone in the Reds and he's done probably everyone to pass through the cornerhouse. Usually his fare is skulls and wings and crucifixes and the occasional thick red '5' when new blood gets marked for life.

She doesn't have that five, curling atop her bicep like some venomous snake. She has something altogether different, and it's growing with every buzzing stroke along her skin. It's a single playing card, a glaring monarch doubled, above and below, with that strange, knowing smirk. She's watching it come to life with every pass of Lazy and his gun, she's watching it and feeling it too, as Lazi strokes out the curve of the Q, but it doesn't really hurt, it's hurting in a way that's got her tingling in all the right places because it's not just the pain but the symbolism of it all too. He rubs down her chest again, wiping excess ink away and streaking some blood. It clips a nipple, already hard, but Lazi doesn't even notice, he's so focused. Not that he ever would, not with the boss herself.

She stretches her arms, up above her head and clenches them underneath the headrest of the chair as the gun touches skin and the needle bangs away at her flesh, electric.

God, it's good to be queen.

* * *

'Move, you animals, fucking _move_!' She's hitting each of them in the back as they pull back, two by two, filtering through the jammed open airlock. One to one it's not even a fair fight, Alliance marines against Batarian raiders is about as unfair as bringing a gun to a bumfight: Batarians stay stuck to the 'floor', moving like they're going through some planet-surface city, but Alliance marines are always on the move. Bouncing up and skimming upside down alongside ceilings, reflecting off walls and sliding along floors and popping around corners from every possible angle. The microgravity of the 'moon' plays this up to an insane degree, and they're leaving dead blinks in their wake, tethered to the floors by their still-active magnetic boots.

They remind her of bodies thrown into the river, ankles weighted down by cinderblocks and left to wave like macabre kelp in the depths. The blood is washing through the corridors, globules of it only slowly drifting down toward the ground, catching and splattering on woven fiber and nanocarbon armors.

She's lost half her guys, but she can't help the broad smile under her helmet. It's probably a good thing that Alliance rebreather helmets cover everything up. It's so familiar though - the room-to-room, hall-to-hall grind, cracking heads and gutting with knives, close and personal. Her Predator hasn't been fired in more than hour, her KABAR doing more than enough work on it's own.

And speak of the devil - she snaps her Predator up and puts a round through the eye lens of a batarian as it peeks out of the end of the corridor, fifty meters back. The thing atmosphere whines with a _bang_ of released pressure and chips of bone and glass crackle off the walls.

'I said move! I want this corridor blown as soon as possible.' Her wrist flicks and her omnitool is there, sketchy map hovering in the air before her, and she's seeing the swaths of suspected enemy movement. They're closing hard on her and her platoon, but this chokepoint can cut them off. Next nearest access to this sector of the asteroid is almost a kilometer westward, and that'll bring any batarians hoping to head her off into contact with her CO and his command group, where they're holding the fort at a damage control nexus.

And the best part: those goddamn blinks still haven't guessed what two of her men are carrying strapped to their backs. She's remembering Elysium, and frankly, she wishes she had _three_ of the devices.

* * *

The recruiting office looks kind of like a bomb went off in it.

Considering the neighborhood, that wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

She's trying to keep from twitching every time her shirt grazes her chest - she's had to go braless because just putting one on earlier nearly made her sob from the pain. It's like someone flayed off her entire chest, a dry crackle that beats in time her heart.

And it's racing.

She's trying not to gasp with every inhale, or groan at every exhale, trying to get her mind off the pain, so she looks at the TVs. They're all on and the local news is insane. She knows if she looked out the windows, if she tugged aside the battered plastic blinds, she could see the smoke rising from a hundred fires.

Riots, real riots, like there hasn't been in fifty years are ripping New York apart.

And she's sitting in an Alliance recruiting office in the upper West side, fidgeting and trying to look calm.

So she's counting the tufts of the carpet underfoot, working outward from her boots. Anything to keep her thoughts occupied, anything to push away everything that she was and could have been and might have been. She's deciding if she should count the bits of paper wedged in the carpet too, fighting for calm, when the door opens and the duty official sticks his head out. He's reedy and wearing metal rimmed glasses, rumpled Alliance fatigues hanging on him like a tent. He's a scrawny little nerd, but he looks at her, bored and uninterested.

'Next.'

There's no one else in the office. No one but Shepard, so she follows him and he holds the door for her, pointing down a short hallway.

'Can you read?' he asks, as the door swings shut. Her fists ball but she manages to keep her voice light.

'Yes, of course.'

* * *

 _It comes to the last, to the latest, the one where it entered, the one where it started, and it plays it again, and now she's seeing it from another side, she's watching herself_

* * *

sigh and swing her arms, back muscles creaking, before she weaves her fingers together and pushes out her chest and groans and pop and sighs again. Alenko is sitting square on his ass, elbows on his knees and head hanging. He's tapped to the max and more, and she vaguely recalls him mentioning something about cleaning up the blood inside his helmet. Nasty shit, those L2 implants.

Williams is pacing, back and forth, right in front of the beacon. The shuttle is ten minutes out, en route to pick up the beacon, them, and boogie. The sky is about to be full of Alliance Navy, and the _Normandy's_ new cargo of a Spectre with a gunshot wound to the head was demanding to be elsewhere when that happened. Elsewhere like a place that knew how to treat penetrative cranial injuries in a dextro-.

Jenkins, though, Jenkins really turned things around. He's alert, ready, calm and confident, standing back near the feet of the stairs that led down to the loading dock. She'd known he'd lock it in, settle down when it mattered. She's happy to see it, really – he had the makings of a decent soldier, and he was a good kid.

Williams started another circuit, fists clenching and opening, clenching and opening, and she's _definitely_ going to shoot a request up the chain for Williams to see a shrink. Losing one's entire company, everyone they knew, all in a split second like that – that's bound to knock some things loose. It was one thing when it was during a campaign, something like, say, Torfan, and quite something else when you're supposed to be on one of the safest planets in the galaxy and then _poof_ , all your friends are dead.

'Look, Williams…' she's trying to think of what to say, something inspiring and maybe calming: something that a guy like Steven Hackett would come up with.

Ashley stops, short, helmet jerking as she looks over at Shepard.

That's when the beacon wakes up.

* * *

New York is burning, it's fires reach from horizon to horizon, an ember-glow under iron clouds but there's no smoke, just fire as far as the eye can see and she's standing on the denuded ruins of buildings, high above and looking down, and she can hear the screaming, hear the screaming of a million million people cooking alive and clawing and scrabbling and trying to escape but the fire is everywhere, building and growing and this is nothing like the riots, she remembers the riots, this is nothing like them this is apocalyptic, this is _biblical_ , this isn't her memory but it is, it's two memories overlaid - one of hers and one whose origin she can't imagine.

She is seeing New York as she left it, grey and infinite and full of life but there's the filter of another, and she can feel it, pushing into her thoughts, alien, intrusive, external: it wraps it's metaphorical fingers around her city and now it's burning eternally and full of the dying and dead.

It's wrong, so _wrong_ , so vivid and offensively clear when it isn't even hers, and she shuts her eyes and her stomach heaves and heaves and she falls to hands and knees, ripping gashes down her arms in ice-knife slashes on blade edged rubble and the blood falls free in perfect droplets, perfect droplets, perfect round droplets hanging in the air/in space and turning, turning in the bright sunlight and clouds whorl across the red surfaces as green blooms like algae and she looks down on Earth, looks down on a thousand planets packed together like billiard balls, rubbing shoulders and turning and she wants to weep, to sob because it's so beautiful.

There's so many and they're so bright and she can feel - _feel_ \- life pulsing from each one, a trillion whispers into her ears and it's like she knows every single person in every single home on every single world. She's a mother with a billion children, a sister with ten thousand brothers. Tears are gouging streaks down her cheeks, acid etching her face, and the bright light is gone, a sweeping dark cutting across the vision of worlds, grasping hand darkness with fingers outspread, five enormous fingers, equidistant and the darkness takes on form and shape and metal edges and tubing and hammered plates and it's five fingers of obsidian metal, reaching down from the heaven as the whispers all stop, and she's a mother wailing over a billion graves, empty of bodies but not of sorrow, the fingers of metal from heaven close in a cage around her world, encircling behind the horizon as a red eye glares, down from above, howling incarnadine and stripping away her flesh, layer by layer, peeling back the lids of her eyes and reaching inside, making play of her body, pinning back her muscles and cracking her ribs, digging in and plucking out her heart, holding it up, beating, beating, before the red eye is all there is, inside and out, eternal and infinite.

She's out of the bed before she even wakes, trays flying silver in the air, tools exploding to flight like flocks of birds. There's too much going on, all around, so she strikes out and lashes out and sends furniture flying, upending a table, flipping a cart.

And with everything she lays hands upon, there's a sharp knife to the eye, a punch of memory and thought and person into her already too crowded head: she grips the rim of a portable scanner and heaves but the second fingers touch metal -

 _'No change today. Brain scan is showing she's as active as if she was awake, but we're also getting REM sleep patterns at the same time. Keep her on the drip and we'll revisit the possibility of a medical coma. I don't agree, that could leave her a vegetable we'll contact the Alliance Arcturus is already sending us specialists I've never treated a human before They'll want updates What am I supposed to tell them, that she's been here for a month and I haven't done anything-'_

There's other people, other minds, other lives filling the room but she can't tell if they're real or not, clustering around her and shouting and reaching but there's afterimages placing IVs she's flipped and replaces bedding on a bed that she's lying in but looking at and hands find her shoulders, firm, controlling hands and her fists hit something that's there, something that yields and shouts and is soft and gives but that sparks images and flashes and more people fill the room, more and more blending over and atop and through each other, a madness of turians and salarians and asari and a few humans that morph and twist and walk through and into each other -

' _Stop! Stop! Stop! You're killing me! Stop!_ ' There's a woman shouting, a woman with a voice ragged with disuse, hoarse from thirst, a woman that's shouting way too close to her, right by her ears and she wants to ask them to stop until she realizes that woman is her, she's shouting, she's screaming really, folding back into a corner, defensive, ready to strike, stuffing hands into her armpits, clenched into fists.

Her rear touches tile floor, cold through thin papery fabric, and she squeezes sandpaper eyes shut, shut tight, anything to block out the rippling insanity around her.

The voices slowly die out, no longer talking over and through and around each other, fading away into silence until a single quiet tone remains, vibrating and odd.

A turian, a single turian, speaking. Speaking nonsense, speaking words over and over again, quiet and soft, words like 'safe' and 'hospital' and 'friends'.

' _I can hear you._ ' she whispers, but even that is loud enough she winces.

'Good. Good. Hi. Can you remember your name?' Dry lips part, but she pauses, because what was her name, there's a doubling of them in her head, overlapping each other, similar but distinct. Two names orbiting a neutron star, faster and faster, blurring together.

Hang on, she thinks. Hang on. I'm Shepard. No matter what.

'Shepard,' she whispers. 'I'm Shepard.'

'Hi, Shepard. I'm Doctor Novus. Do you know what that means?' Does she - ?

'What hospital am I in?'

'Huerta Memorial, Commander. We've all been very worried about you.' The turian is still whispering, but the uncertainty is gone from his voice. 'Do you want some water?'

Water. Yes, _fuck_ yes, she wanted water -

'God, yes.' She hears some footsteps, water splashing on plastic.

'Can I bring this to you?'

'Yes. _Yes_.' -even whispering leaves echoes bouncing around the hollowed out chamber of her skull- 'Just put it down. Don't- _don't touch me._ Don't-I don't know-' The air moves, there's a presence closer, plastic on tile. She gropes, blindly, eyes still shut, but as soon as a fingertip touches the plastic, it's like touching a live wire and she jerks back, not fast enough before

 _'It's ok. You're safe. Commander? Shepard? Can you hear me? You're safe. You're in a hospital. It's ok. There's a woman in the corner, fading blue/green bruises across the entire side of her face, clad in a thin hospital gown, tall but folded up into the corner, back to the wall and facing everything all at once-_

And as fast as the images and thoughts come they are gone, vanishing as suddenly and forcefully as they arrived, leaving only whispers and hints. She pokes out a finger again, feeling the plastic, and again she sees herself, from the outside, from above and across the room, moving in closer, from the eyes of, from the eyes -

Oh.

Oh.

From the eyes of the doctor.

* * *

 **Original author's note, for new readers:**

 _And thus concludes Chapter Zero of '_ Echo _'_

 _First things first – this story is not a standard 'Let me play Mass Effect and serialize what happened.' Not only because I will not a: be playing mass effect (which I honestly haven't done in years, now), but because b: there will be significant deviation from not only the plot, but also the characters. The broad strokes will remain the same, but much of the minutiae will be different._

Echo _is the actual full story version of the little bits that are in another work of mine,_ 'Moments and Memories'. _If you have read that, then you at least have a mild inkling of what is to come._

 _I will be posting an author's note in similar format at the end of each chapter, provided there's reason to. I have the intention of continuing this story - albeit it_ will _be a slow process and prone to significant gaps. I am a very busy man, and on top of both professional/personal projects I am also actively writing with the intent to publish. This is but one of about a dozen of ongoing writing projects I currently have - and you must understand, as much as I love(d) Mass Effect, a fanfiction is quite low on my list of priorities. Rest assured, should this project die, I_ WILL _let you know, rather than vanish forever. I have been on the other end of that many times with stories I was into, and I've no intention of becoming that which I spurn._

 **New update:**

 _Sup nerds. Fooled you! So I redid the whole Chapter Zero. I super wasn't happy with the original stuff, and I'm still a bit unsure about the overall quality of this, but I've decided to break the chains and post the fucking thing and stop hand-wringing over 'if it is up to par with what I know I can do' and also to free myself from the bounds of trying to perfectly recreate Mass Effect. That was never the plan anyway, so out with the standard 'Let's begin on the Normandy as it flies to the Relay' kind of half-baked opening. This is in media res and I shall treat this like it's not an established IP that presumes much knowledge from the reader, but like a proper story that must needs begin and explain and tell an internally coherent tale._

 _Despite the rewrite of this chapter, nothing is truly changed. This is the same Shepard as in the first iteration of Echo, and my vision for the story remains unaltered. You may notice that this is super off the path, and that there's a lot of crap going on. Canny readers may pick up what is occuring, but it will be made clear in time._

 _Spent a while sketching out future ideas with my friend, planning a lot for the far future into ME2 and 3. Some really, really exciting stuff and it's honestly helping me stay motivated on this, because I want to get there. Have no fear, I still want to do the best I can on this and won't be rushing along. Andromeda also has helped revive my interest in Mass Effect, though not the way you think. I am highly disappointed in it (and honestly have been since the initial reveal), but as I've been reminded more and more of ME1 I'm remember just how much I loved it. I might actually do that replay now. As such, by the way, don't get your hopes up for any Andromeda related content here or anywhere. It may as well not exist for all I'm concerned._

 _This story is not dead. I have decided that while the quality may vary, and indeed dip outside of what I would consider acceptable by the standards I hold myself too, I shall ignore it and push on. This is an exercise in actually writing longform beyond vignettes and half-begun tales, so pitfalls are to be welcomed as learning experiences._

 _As always, thanks you reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and let me know with a review! Until next time, I'll be spinning wraithbone and hunting mon'keigh;_

the bonesinger of yme-loc


	2. Chapter 01: Contradictory Analysis

Usually the sound of someone at the door meant another tedious round of tests, so Shepard didn't even bother looking up or gracing her visitor with a greeting. She flicked through another page of the news, scrolling past bullshit about some asari colony raising a stink over the Republics ignoring it or something. The ongoing stories about Eden Prime, and y'know, the invasion of geth that killed only a few hundred thousand humans were getting buried deeper and deeper every day in the dross and crap that only a galactic culture can churn out on a daily basis.

'If you're looking for something new, you won't find it in there.' She was grinning even before her visitor finished his sentence, pushing herself upright on the bed and waving him in.

'Captain! Come in on, please, sit or stand or just take up space so the damn doctors will leave me alone.' Anderson laughed, and snagged a comfy recliner situated opposite her bed, over by the little kitchenette that her doctors refused to let her use. The room they had her in was practically a little suite, intended for long-term patients who were mostly ambulatory but needed supervision.

She was plenty of the former and wanted absolutely none of the latter.

Anderson went to drag the recliner over, stopping short as its feet shrieked against the laminated floors. He met her eyes, raised an eyebrow, and then half lifted, half drug the chair over.

'Planning to spend the night? I don't mind but I think Doctor Serrus might.'

'Funny, Shepard. No, we've got some things to talk about and I'd rather be comfortable. Just got out of a meeting with Udina for the past three hours, and that man prides himself in having the least comfortable chairs in the galaxy in his office.' Anderson dusted his hands off, recliner now right next to her bed and dropped into it. 'And it's David, not Captain.' Not the first time he's said that since she woke up, but somehow it just doesn't stick.

'Sorry David. Old habits, right?'

'Sure,' he said, settling in while she scooted closer to the corresponding side of her bed.

'So!' he said, leaning back and locking his fingers behind his head. 'How are you doing? You're looking much better.' She took a moment to mull it over, formulating the most appropriate and politic answer. The bruises were mostly faded by now, just a few still lingering nasty yellow and black ones along her side and leg from where the beacon had, apparently, slammed her into the metal decking.

'Bored. And angry. Maybe more angry than bored. But you're here now, so you can fix the first. Get me released.'

'I'm afraid I can't do that just yet, Alice. Hackett's deferring to the experts here, and since you sort of stepped out of our jurisdiction the second we decided to make you a Spectre…' She fixed him with a glare that very clearly said 'I blame you', but he just shrugged. Bastard.

'I agree. Sorry. I do. You took a hell of a beating on Eden Prime, and that's not touching whatever that beacon did to you. Still hallucinating?' Oh she sure was _glad_ she shared that tidbit with the doctors.

'No, and I haven't for more than a week. I'm _fine_ , David, and I'm going to do a live reenactment of Torfan if they try to keep me here another month like they keep threatening.'

'They're not threatening, Alice, they're _projecting_.'

'Whatever it is, make them stop.' David stretched his arms, then sat forward, leaning closer and closing the distance some. He dropped his voice, and the change in demeanor was obvious. Good – to hell with happy catch up time, she wanted _something_.

'Look, Shepard, I'm not just here for a friendly visit. You said you're doing fine, and the doctors are agreeing – so I think it's about time we discussed Eden Prime.'

'David, we've been over this. I remember bits and pieces. Landing is clear, I remember heading toward the excavations. I remember the geth drones jumping us. It gets choppy after that. I think I maybe remember that marine you told me about, Williams was it? Pink armor, something like that? The rest of it is like trying to remember a dream. I know it's there but it's – it's – it's.' She growled. 'It's out of reach. Try to snatch it but it just like – poof – squirts away.' Day after day she'd run through the events she recalled. Boarding the Normandy, meeting Kryick. The briefing about Eden Prime, meeting the division heads on the Normandy, stowing her gear. Jenkins all excited and raring to go. Catching up shortly with Alenko in the mess. It was all so clear, almost unnaturally so. Then at Prime it just…cut out. But it felt like it was there, like it was _juuuust_ out of reach, taunting her.

'That's alright. You've read the report, none of it contradicts with what you can remember.' She kneaded the sheets with her hands, rolling her shoulders.

'It just bugs me. Kryick got killed there, you'd think I'd remember something as important as that. Shit, David, he was _my_ responsibility-'

'Alice-'

'No, David, stop. He was. Yeah, I was his too, but he was mine. Spectre working with the Alliance for the first time, there to check me out. His death is on _me_. And I can't even remember it, dammit.' She took a breath, rolling her shoulders. Sure, people died. That itself wasn't really concerning; she was sure Kryick was a very nice turian and a very good Spectre but she wasn't going to grieve over someone she didn't know – it was the responsibility of it. She'd taken on the duty, and she'd failed it. Next to her, David adjusted himself, crossing one leg over the other.

'I won't argue with you Shepard. I know the kind of feeling. It doesn't go away.' He motioned for Shepard's tablet.

'May I?' She tossed it over perhaps more violently than she'd planned, though he caught it neatly, slotting in an Alliance chip.

'Knock yourself out. It's not mine anyway.'

'I just want to pull up the mission report. It's public record anyway, at this point, since the Council likes to be 'open'. There's a couple things in there.' It wasn't the first time they'd been through it, the first being shortly after she awoke, and after she'd calmed down enough and stopped… _touching_ things. Alliance debrief lite, Anderson edition, essentially. She waited, letting him scroll through the report, brow furrowed in focus. Her gloves were irritating her again, warm and a little itchy. She scratched around the cuff of one, barely able to dig into the seam with the thickened fingers. Doctor Serrus said they were originally for hand injuries – they had slots for hard plastic inserts to immobilize bones and could be adjusted to various hand sizes. Without those inserts, of course, they were just fabric gloves, and perfect for 'consistent sensory input that should alleviate the nerve hyperstress' that she apparently suffered from. They stopped her from jumping out of her body, and that was enough. Whether it was because she was getting a handle on it, or because she'd already _felt_ the gloves completely when putting them on she didn't know. And really, honestly, didn't want to test.

'Here. Williams reported that Nihlus was shot when you were investigating the tram station, correct?' Anderson cut into her thoughts, middle finger gesturing at a passage of text on the tablet in front of him.

'If that's what she said, that's what happened. Alenko say the same?'

'He did. I know you said you don't remember. The report speculates it was a geth sniper, maybe. You ordered his body left behind in order to complete the mission.'

'It's weird to hear you say that. It's like from someone else's life.' Reading the whole report was bizarre. She agreed with everything…she…had done, understanding it all because after all it had been Shepard. But at the same time, it was like reading fiction, or like a theoretical exercise. Bizarre.

'I know. I'm sorry.'

'No, it's fine. Go on.' Anderson continued, scanning off the tablet.

'Body wasn't recovered, and is presumed destroyed when the geth dreadnought bombarded the area from orbit. Got a tray?' She blinked.

''Scuse me?'

'A tray. Like for food.'

'Oh. Right. Yes.' The dinner tray she used, tucked away on the other side of her bed. She reached down and pulled it up, passing it over.

'Thanks.' Anderson set it up on the bed between them, placing the tablet atop it, before producing a thin notepad from a jacket pocket along with an honest to god pencil. Those joined the tablet on the table between then.

'This room is clean, Alice.' Clean. Free of listening devices or eavesdropping. How did he-no, better question. Why did he know the room was clean, and why was he telling her. 'What I'm going to tell you isn't in the official report. It's not in the Alliance's confidential report. It's in nothing except my head, and a handful of other people's.'

'This is some real cloak-and-dagger shit, David.' Yet the old flame was sniffing the air inside her. The warm little drive that said 'Oh yes, something is going to happen, and you are going to be there. No – you're going to _make_ it happen.'

'It have anything to do with the Council fucking the Alliance both ways ever since Eden Prime? I haven't been under a rock, David, I'm getting what the extranet is putting out. Not a single mention of that ship. We _all_ saw that ship. We have footage for christ's sake. What is Hackett's game?'

'It does. We have a few people on the cleaning staff here that have swept the room. For the other stuff we couldn't remove, I'm wearing a scoot. Special gift from the Admiral. So as long as I'm in here today, we can talk about anything. Most anything.'

'A scoot? What the hell are you sitting on?' Scoots, by way of degenerated acronym: Self Contained Omnidirectional Obfuscation Devices [SCOOD] were very rare and very expensive hardware usually doled out only to Alliance Intelligence, and even there they were nigh-legendary.

'Let me continue, Alice. You'll understand. For one, Nihlus' body was recovered from Eden Prime. The Normandy secured it before coming to get you after the beacon.' As Anderson spoke, he wrote three little words on the notepad.

 _Nihlus is alive._

'It wasn't a geth sniper. The wound and trajectory suggests small caliber. Handgun, maybe a hand cannon at most. It had to have been close range, and _inside his shields_.'

 _Nihlus knows who it was_. _A turian was commanding the geth._

'And it's _big_ , Alice. Not big, it's huge. Hackett's betting his career on it.' Nihlus is alive. He knows who the turian was who was commanding the geth. Her head was spinning, trying desperately to even conceive what the could _possibly_ be so earth-shaking that _Admiral Steven Hackett_ was willing to bet his career on it. Shit, something as big as Anderson was implying, it couldn't be-she gasped, couldn't help it.

 _Not Sparatus?_ She mouthed, and David squinted, confused.

 _Spa-ra-tus?_ She carefully shaped each syllable, and David shook his head.

'No, wrong kind of huge. That would be nightmare. This is…this is just huge. So we have, uh, we have Solitaire in our stacked deck, and I know that's stretching the metaphor. We've got Solitaire and more than that, we've got you. Up until you rejoined the land of the living two weeks ago, the assumption was you were down and out. Not a player, you know? But Solitaire's information gives us so much to go on. Alenko is already working on it, and we've reached out to C-Sec. Provisional liason, since we haven't told them much.' David sighed and scratched out some more on the notepad, still talking as Shepard tried to soak it all in, order it, understand what he was saying.

 _Nihlus paralyzed. Will live. This could shake up the whole state of the galaxy._

 _'_ So…Nihlus' body was recovered and you could examine the injury. And this 'Solitaire' is giving us intel.' She was trying to be circumspect, beat around the bush like Anderson was, but she was buzzing.

'Essentially. We have a lot more on that ship too. The Council has some, but we're holding a lot of it until Solitaire is ready to go public. We're trying to pile up as much as we can, so that when we tip it onto the Council's head, there's no chance they can dig their way out.' Anderson pulled the chip out of the tablet, handing it back. He took the paper, tore it off the pad along with several sheets underneath, folded them up and tucked them into his breast pocket. 'Now, nothing more until you're out.'

'Until I'm out? David if I wanted out this morning, you just came in and lit a _fire_ under my ass. This is going to kill me, sitting here doing nothing.' Do more than kill, just not _knowing_ was going to drive her mad. 'You want me to start hallucinating again?'

'Don't joke. We need you better and back out there as soon as the doctors clear you, and not before. This is going to be vacuum-sealed, Alice, and we want _everything_ in perfect order.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. David, you know me. Well, you know what I do. I'm a professional – why else did you suggest me for Spectre?'

'Not a dig at you, Alice. I just don't want anyone to try to make the case that you're still mentally unfit. This isn't about you; this is about what other people might try to pull _against_ you. So whatever the doctors say, we're toeing that line. Can I rely on you?' She blew out a breath and flopped her head back against the pillow.

'I'm always a team player. That's me.'

'Fantastic. I brought a deck of cards with me, want to play a few rounds?' The sheer incongruity of the offer pulled a laugh out of her, and she shook her head, still giggling as Anderson shrugged.

'What? I didn't come up with those card analogies off the top of my head. Hackett's got me playing Skyllian rules Quasar.'

'I've got whiplash from the conversation shift. But sure, deal. Beats watching these walls.'

He tapped out the cards from a plastic case onto the dinner tray, and started to shuffle.

Nihlus alive, Council with a sword of Damocles over its head, Alliance playing games. Two hundred thousand colonists and ten thousand sailors dead. And they were going to play some quasar. She reached over for the box of latex gloves, peeling off the soft, but less dexterous fabric ones and sliding on two on while Anderson dealt. He didn't comment, having already read the official reason. Nerve ending hypersensitivity in the extremities from contact with the beacon.

She hadn't felt the need to contradict the analysis.

* * *

 _ **Author's Note**_

 _OH SHIT! It's not dead! Yeah, this is still ongoing. Really. It is. I swear. For the grand total of like...one of you? that have followed this story, and you got an update: HAHA! I bet you're confused. Yeah, Chapter One got rewritten. I wasn't happy with it. A/N on that chapter explains further._

 _So, Shepard is awake and raring to get back out and into the world. Still some strangeness with her hands, and whatever that is. We shall see, right?_

 _I reiterate: Echo isn't dead. It's just taking a while. I'm knee deep in job applications, lesson planning and writing for professional (read, money making for the bills!) reasons, so this is the back burner's back burner. I have a google doc that I'm fleshing out as an entire timeline of the first game to follow, with all the major parts I want to hit and see. Echo will go on!_

 _Until next time (whenever that may be)_

the bonesinger of yme-loc


	3. Chapter 02: Putting Alice Back On

_They left the relay in a scream of light and static discharge._

 _Warning of their arrival spread barely faster than the warships themselves. All their running lights were lit, identifiers shouting into the void. They dared all to see and know them. Yet even the wash of electromagnetic handshakes, the bow-shock of the fleet, could barely keep pace with the vessels. At a respectable percentage of c, dangerously fast, too fast for sensor returns, open to ambush, they howled through the nebula, stirring gasses into whorls of scattered light behind them, arrowing deeper into the celestial nursery, leaving scattered and flatfooted patrols in their wake._

 _They were the_ Orizaba _and the_ Shenzen _, the_ Kinshaha _and_ Chicago _and_ Frankfurt _, the_ Cape Town _and_ Aberdeen _and_ Ahmedabad _. Squadrons of frigates and escorts attended them, forming wings that stretched out and above and below the heavyweights. A show of force greater than that which sparked off the First Contact war swept through the Serpent Nebula._

 _They burned through the night toward the cradle of culture._

* * *

Alenko was loitering by the window as she pulled up her uniform trousers, fumbling a bit with the belt, still a little clumsy with the gloves. She could hear the low hum of his omnitool, though he was out of sight around the corner. The small bathroom's door was still open: they'd been talking back and forth as she got dressed. It was a good feeling, getting out of the papery hospital gowns the nurses insisted she continue to wear, and back into real clothes. More than that, really. It was being back in uniform, pulling back on that skin that pulled a bit of a blanket over her brain. White, cotton navy-issue underwear, and she'd taken a minute to rub at the old scar between her breasts, the still-shiny expanse of skin. She'd always just said it was from a fire when she was a kid, and that had always been accepted. Black socks, dense weave, with the Systems Alliance logo facing out, above the ankle. Then the pressed black trousers, pleated sharp enough to cut. Down the outside of each ran the N7 stripe, red bracketed by white, no thicker than the width of her thumb. She'd stitched on her own stripe years ago, onto the trousers still left hanging in her little apartment in Vancouver.

In front of the half-length mirror, over the sink, Alice leaned forward, left hand still unconsciously rubbing at her chest. She'd lost some definition, tensing her arms and flexing. Month in a coma and two weeks on her ass sort of does that, and she mentally queued up a month's worth of exercises to beat that back. Hair was noticeably longer, the dark, dark brown cascade getting close to brushing her shoulders. Add a trip to the barber, then.

This was a part of why she'd always hated being laid up, the amount of crap just kept piling higher the whole time. Akuze had been the worst – almost four months out of action. She'd felt weak as a kitten afterward, and hated every second of the exhausting three months she'd spent drenched in sweat, clawing back to what she felt was baseline. It had never _quite_ felt like she'd made it back to where she was before.

Next was the white undershirt, covering up the scar, the droplets of blood scattered across her left shoulder, the little eight-pointed stars on both collarbones, the grinning skull under her left breast, the tangled barbed wire that encircled a tiger that ran along her right forearm. All of them stark against her pale skin, inked in hard greys and blacks, splashes of crimson. She could picture the shepherd's crook that slashed across her back, notched in two places. She'd told so many stories for what each one meant over the years and she was pretty certain no two were the same.

Then the double-breasted dress jacket, brilliant white, double row of golden buttons up the front, each worked with the Alliance Crest. The high collar that hid the crucifixes on either side of her neck. The gloves fouled her up here again, and she fumbled the first few buttons before she got into the pattern of it, pinch and pop. A little box sitting on the closed toilet had, and she'd checked, every single medal and ribbon she could wear. She cinched the broad, deep blue belt tight about the coat, lining up the buckle exactly in the mirror, making sure the N7 bar up the left side of her jacket ran precisely to meet the one on her pants. She'd add the braid around that arm later.

At first she'd been irritated they sent all her decorations, but now she opened the plastic box with a ghost of a smile on her face.

It felt like she was putting on Alice, climbing back into the person she knew so well, leaving behind the limbo of the past two weeks. A little part of her warned not to get too comfortable – wasn't the endgame here to become a Spectre, to leave all this behind? But with each ribbon she slotted into place the more centered she felt, the occasional images of spinning worlds, drifting ash faded away.

Alenko had been quiet for a little while, so she cleared her throat, wanting to talk, to fill the silence as she rebuilt herself.

'You said Hackett brought the _Orizaba_ here?' A moment of silence as she slotted another ribbon onto the bar, mentally tallying the ones she had remaining. It always took a moment of thinking to keep them all in order. Too many for too few years.

'What? Yeah, the _Orizaba_ and seven cruisers. It must've had Arcturus in a frenzy to pull them off on such short notice. Udina was – well, _I_ didn't tell you this, but Udina was pissed. I think he's still hoping for an easy solution with the Council.' The way Alenko said it, phrased it, caught.

'So you don't think there's an easy end, Lieutenant?' Another moment of silence, and she can imagine him trying to couch a response. 'Relax; you're my ear to the ground in here. All I know is from Anderson and you. And the news.' She snorted, since the Citadel stations had been notably one-sided. 'What's the general feeling? People can't be happy.'

'I – ah. Well. No. A lot of people are blaming the Council. For Eden Prime, I mean, not just them dragging their feet afterward. But the attack itself. It's like…signing the Shanxi Accords was never all that popular, right? But after a while, it seemed like it was going to work out. There was Mindoir and Elysium, but we kicked back. And the Council didn't say a word.' Right – she remembers the talk after Torfan, after the Hegemony rose hell over what the Alliance – what _she_ – did on that moon. But the Council had only released a statement that it did not have authority over what occurred in the Traverse as long as it did not spill into Council Space. People had taken it as approval of the Alliance finally kicking the slavers in the balls and it had rather improved the dim view most of the Navy had of the Council.

'And then Eden Prime gets hit and the Council is acting like it's the Alliance's fault. Okay. Let me guess – people are talking about pulling out of the Council.' She could see it now, honestly, the rhetoric no different than what she'd heard about after the Shanxi Accords.

'I don't think it's really being said in those words, ma'am, but the sentiment is…well, the sentiment is definitely there. Earth keeps getting worse, we can't colonize enough planets and even if we did, it's not like we could just lift a billion or two people off Earth for them. So there's that discontent, and now with the Council – it's a lot of 'what have they done for us, anyway' that I'm hearing. And people were never happy after Shanxi. The way the turians blamed us for it. Now people are pointing at the turians, asking 'where was the turian fleet' when Eden Prime got hit. Yeah. I know how that sounds, right, turians protecting an Alliance colony? But that's what people are saying. Why should we limit our Navy if the turians aren't going to fill in the blanks, y'know?'

'Shit. And here we are right in the middle.' What timing. Less than a week for things to go totally tits-up, from shiny Spectre plans to maybe leaving the Council. 'You know, if I was planning something, I mean something _big_ , right? I'd want the Alliance out of the Council.' Just musing, but she remembered how, back in New York, they'd break up groups of Tigers by nipping at them from side alleys, little feints to pull off people from the group. Then they'd hit the stragglers all at once, and roll them up.

'Divide and conquer, something like that?'

'Something like that. What did I read a couple of days ago? Last economic report had the Alliance marked to pass the Protectorate in GDP in like ten years? That's gotta be concerning to some people.' The reflected Alice in the mirror frowned, the ribbon bar forgotten in her hands. 'But they can't see us as that big of a threat. I've read about the Hierarchy fleet. And everyone else has what, a thousand years on us?'

'Maybe they're just taking it safe? Or they're after the Alliance itself. Okay, so we have an unknown enemy that wants the Alliance out of the Council. But are they actually after the Council, or the Alliance?'

'Beats the hell out of me, I'm just getting dressed in a bathroom. I haven't even had lunch today.' She heard Alenko's laugh from the other room.

'Alright ma'am. We'll bring it up to the Admiral.'

'I'm sure he's considered this.'

'Probably.' She still had the ribbon bar in her hands, distracted by the conversation. Right, perhaps not the best idea to consider the future of the Alliance right now. First things first, Alice. First things first.

So she pinned on her ribbons, looped the N7 braid around her left arm and fixed it in place, and picked up her cap. The scrambled eggs were polished bright, the Alliance Navy emblem bright and silver at the peak. It fit perfectly, exactly her size, and the thought of someone going on a shopping trip to scrounge up everything to her exact specifications was a passing amusement. More – that Hackett had thought it important to have on hand while _also_ activating a fleet task force all in, what was it Anderson had said, six hours? The Admiral thought of everything. Even the optional indigo shoulder-cape that had been added to the whites a few years back was included. The Alliance was always trying to incorporate as much as it could from the old countries of Earth, but generally most agreed _this_ was a bit too much. She tossed it on anyway, letting it drape over her right shoulder, the left side foreshortened and tossed back so as not to interfere with the ribbons and braiding.

It looked rakish, and all the more reason to wear it. The Admiral _had_ included it, so it had to be for a reason. Pulling out all stops before the Council, probably. It made the gloves look like a natural part of the whites too – black gloves to black pants, blue belt to blue drape, things like that. With a mental shrug, leaving it in the hands of whatever think-tank had designed this by committee; she stepped back out into the room she was finally escaping. Alenko looked her up and down, eyes lingering on the drape, but said nothing. You don't question senior officers, especially in their choice of dress.

'Are those gloves better, ma'am?' She flexed both hands and gave him doubled thumbs up.

'You bet they are.'

She'd traded the soft fabric ones the hospital had issued her for a black leather pair Alenko had brought earlier. Certainly an improvement from the poisonous green of the cloth ones, she had still tentatively reached out to brush a fingertip against the nightstand – and had just as quickly yanked the new pair on, blinking back afterimages of someone else's life. They must've been brand new and barely handled: she only got a flash of a man's hands, swishing the gloves in front of a scanner in a store, before her mind settled and it was gone. She hadn't even twitched or reacted, Alenko had just kept talking as if nothing happened. It was a little surprising how quickly she got used to it – from it being a gut-wrenching vertigo to being a nuisance in two weeks flat.

Then again, it did not seem likely to a: kill her or b: drive her insane which when weighted against some of the other things she had survived made it seem a little lower on the priority list. The origin was obvious, she'd realized. It could be nothing other than the prothean beacon: it had done _something_ to her when its energy enveloped her, knocking her into that sort-of coma where she'd passed a full month. Exactly _what_ it did beat the hell out of her. Beat the hell out of the doctors too, even the specialists the Alliance had flown out to the Citadel.

She's always prided herself on trying to solve her own problems, so she'd started looking into it herself, though there wasn't the slightest thought she'd figure out more than people who, y'know, spent their lives doing this. Some surreptitious and clumsy research via the extranet into the world of neuroscience and the human brain had left her feeling extremely out of her depth. There was no real way to know where to begin in the first place. Did she look up about human brains? Look for information on the protheans, which just from the little briefing Kryick had given her on the _Normandy_ , she could already expect to find little to nothing. They made the relays, they made the Citadel, yadda yadda. Surely nothing about beacons that gave you freaky powers.

So if it was to look into human neurology – well, she hadn't even _known_ the word 'neurology' until she'd started searching around, and asking some sideways questions of her doctors.

It wasn't like she'd had much of an education growing up in New York and N7 Officer Candidate School was more focused on military theory and leadership training than on biological sciences and things like that.

Her doctors had been decent, and one of them, a turian, had recommended some journals on the extranet if she was interested. Said he was glad a patient was taking an interest in their situation, and made a joke about making sure she didn't end up knowing more than he did.

She'd laughed dutifully, because that's what that kind of attempted friendliness called for, and then dug into the journals. She recognized one of the names signed to one: the turian doctor himself. Sneaky.

It was like trying to understand another language.

 _Cognitive recall in mimetic resonance and metamemory development._

She'd shut off her tablet after realizing it was past two A.M., local, and she'd spent most of the past day taking more time looking up the definitions of words than actually understanding what the article was even talking about. Not for the first time she'd fought down the feeling she was at the bottom of a well of inadequacy, looking up at the people milling around above. It woke shades of memories from OCS, only four years after she'd forced herself to learn how to read in Alliance Basic, hiding under sheets with flashlights and flashcards, when she'd choked down her pride and accepted a few lessons from another private, one she had trusted to keep her mouth shut. Struggling through theory courses and military history courses, juggling names and dates and places and battles and more.

Nights spent pouring over texts until her eyes felt dried to dust.

There had been a growing sense of understanding, of a sort of…if not _awe_ , then respect for the breadth of what there really was in the world, outside of the twisting alleys and SROs and burned out warehouses of New York. A sense that this is what she'd missed, what everyone she had known had missed out on, hadn't even understood, or even _known_ they were missing. An entire world, entire galaxy out there. She'd learned about places she never knew existed, places a thousand years ago or more that felt like they were more tangible in that moment than the life she left behind.

The thought had been strange, but she leapt at it. Distancing, shutting off, sealing away – anything to separate Alice from Alicja.

It was the feeling she was getting again, trying to dig into what had happened to her.

If she wasn't going to tell her doctors about her memory thing (and frankly, she didn't think they'd believe it for a second, even if she thought of a half dozen obvious ways to prove she was telling the truth), then it was on her to figure out exactly what had happened.

Because the more she read, the more concerned Alice was about the implications.

So she felt other people by touching things they had.

Which meant she figured was somehow reliving their memories. That seemed to be impossible, from what she'd read about how memories form and are recalled. There was no point pretending she understood it all, but what she did pointed to the very idea of 'touch a cup, look through a turian's eyes' being absolutely impossible.

It seemed the universe did not care about impossible. (And here she remembered that as of forty years ago, the thought of humans throwing around telekinesis and manipulating black holes with their mind would've been considered ridiculous.)

Yet if the beacon did something to her, something that could reach into her head, mess with her memories, put something as inexplicable as… _this…_ into her hands, there was no telling what else it had done that she didn't even know.

Her doctors, whose names she had tried to learn, forgotten, and not tried again, had assured her that her scans looked normal, befitting a healthy human woman twenty-nine years of age.

A day or two after that, the thought came back up, and she wondered if that did maybe narrow down how old she actually was, and put the thought away again.

Two weeks though, and just as sensitive: she danced around the idea that this might be permanent, as in _for life_ , not really ready to grapple with that yet, and was mostly hoping the gloves would just end up part of the 'Shepard' image and no one would ask further. They _did_ look good with the uniform.

Alenko glanced back out the window, peering through blinds he pushed aside with a finger.

'There's still a lot of media camped out there.'

'I'd been sort of hoping they'd give up after a while. I'm sure Anderson hasn't let out how long I would be in here.' Alenko just shrugged, tugging on his own dress jacket to smooth it out. There wasn't a wrinkle on it, pristine and white like hers; matching the cap he had tucked under one arm. It was just a habit of his she'd noticed, constantly fidgeting, either straightening his jacket or flipping around a pen. Always some part of him in motion, some kind of activity. Tapping a foot, tapping his thumb against each fingertip. A few times she'd had to bite back asking him to knock it off – fidgeting drove her insane. But Alenko and Anderson had been her only real connections to the outside world, and even if she outranked him (or at least _had_ outranked him, before being detached for this whole disaster of a mission), she wasn't going to bite at someone trying to help.

And speaking of that: being 'detached' from the Navy for the Spectres, of suspending her commission. For all the talk on Arcturus of Shepard stepping outside the Navy, of her answering to the Council and the Council _alone_ , it seemed someone was anxious to impress on the media that Alice was still an officer of the Systems Alliance. Her whites, her ribbons, everything. It felt good to put Alice Shepard back on, but the implications of it were strange. On the one hand, it could mean that they had her back: that it was supposed to be an indication that no matter what she would have the full force of the Systems Alliance Government and Navy behind her.

It could also be like what her sergeant had said once, during the Blitz: 'when you suspect the shitter floor is about to give way, send in the person you don't mind smelling like crap to jump up and down a few times'.

Alenko, at the door, peeked out into the hallway. 'I think, ma'am, they know you're the real story on the Citadel. The Council has been talking since the attack on Eden Prime, so there's nothing new there, and nothing really, you know: exclusive. The Alliance won't even confirm the sky is blue it's been so quiet, but the Embassy is right by the Tower and there are laws against people camping out. So you're all that's left for something big and new after Eden Prime. And two minutes, ma'am.'

'I do have some experience with media. Call it wishful thinking then, being in the limelight once was enough. You remember the blitz after Elysium.'

'The media one, or the Skyllian one, ma'am?'

'Ha ha ha. That's funny, _lieutenant_. How old would you have been then, ten? Eleven?'

'I'm sure it was something like that.' She did laugh then: Alenko had to be well into his thirties, and his implants did no justice to youthfulness.

'Right. As long as the Alliance has cars for us, since I don't fancy walking to the Embassy from here. I don't actually know where we are. Alenko-'

'We're just about half a rotation from the Embassies and Tower. Ten minutes at most by air.' He checked his omnitool again, and peered out into the hallway once more. He took his hat from under his arm, carefully placing it on his head, adjusting the band, the peak.

'Stop reading my mind. Lieutenants aren't ready for that level of disorder. Let's get out of here. I hate hospitals.' Alenko held the door for her as she left: the consummate junior officer escort.

The halls beyond were absolutely empty, devoid of any of the usual nurses and activity. Every door was shut, and while Huerta was a small, very exclusive facility, it still momentarily surprised her the lengths the Alliance had gone to. And connected to that, that the Council had allowed it.

'Is the whole place shut down?' She kept her voice low – not quite a whisper, but close. Every twenty feet were sailors in the uniform of Systems Alliance Military Police, holsters notably _not_ empty. Matte black grips of Kesslers poked out of oiled leather. They kept their eyes fixed ahead, not saluting or acknowledging Alice as they passed.

'Just the route we're taking. Huerta is small enough. I heard there's only fifteen other patients here, and they have staff staying in each room just in case.'

It was a little overwhelming, to be honest. A whole hospital, or at least a clinic, shut down just so that she could leave with the minimum of interaction with anyone. She tried to overlay the Red Cross clinics in New York, the few that hadn't burned down or been looted. How they'd been massively overcrowded, people spilling onto the streets outside, lining the fronts of buildings around them, people who set up little tents or gathered around fire barrels to stay warm. The insides shabby and worn, the floors rough, wallpaper peeling in places. In others: old bullet holes. The check-in counter with its massive pane of bulletproof glass, thick as a bottle.

She tried to compare the two in her head: Huerta with its shining white and ash-grey marbled floor, spotless steel bumpers along the walls, holographs along the ceiling to guide a wayward patient or visitor to where they needed to be. The temptation to take off a glove, run a finger along the rail, to feel the soul of the building came, went. There was no way to know who had laid hands on that railing, if more than just doctors had. There were some pains she could do without.

Alenko directed her along, down the corridor from her room to a lift, then down to the ground floor, and past a few waiting rooms. The thought at the back of her mind that had been growing since the morning blossomed fully.

'You know, Alenko, this is all very obvious. MPs lining the corridors, a combat biotic for an escort, a private motorcade. A blind kid could see there's a target on my back. And if there wasn't, then a sensible might find themselves wondering if maybe there _should_ be, since we all think I know something.'

'I hope that's not the case, ma'am. I _certainly_ hope no one focuses on you and only you, and thinks that you're all that we've got.' She smiled, as Alenko confirmed what she had suspected.

Clever, Anderson, clever. Make Alice Shepard the centerpiece: put up in famous Huerta, surrounded by Alliance guards, constant secret meetings with the Admiral's Number Two, have her led out in front of the camped out media by a biotic, right to a private motorcade.

And then another piece clicked into place: Hackett had shown up to the Citadel.

Like she'd talked about with Alenko – the Admiral had taken the _Orizaba_ and an escort detachment of cruisers, and flouted Citadel law and policy to jump _directly_ into the Serpent Nebula, and face down the Citadel Defence Fleet. The fleet the Admiral brought had been twice the size of the one that had attacked Shanxi during the First Contact War, and while it wasn't a full Alliance Fleet, it was still a task force, a clear and present threat glaring at the Citadel from only a few thousand kilometers away. Alenko had said it felt like it was minutes from a shooting war, while Anderson denied it had ever gotten close to that. The Admiral had, reportedly, spoken directly to the Council from his conference room on _Orizaba_ , and while no one knew what was said, Alliance Task Force Juliet One was allowed to take up station-keeping outside the traffic lanes, just beyond the wards, under the guns of six Hierarchy dreadnoughts.

It was most notably _not_ told to depart.

He had done this the day after she came out of her coma, and according to Anderson, it had been to head off the Citadel calling her to testify about the Eden Prime disaster and the death of Nihlus Kryick.

For two weeks she'd chewed on that; the Council surely had been furious, and the Alliance was catching hell in the galactic networks about it, though supposedly on the home front people were praising Hackett's 'decisive, take-charge attitude' and how he was 'keeping the pressure on the bastards who forgot a hundred thousand _humans_ died on Eden Prime, too'.

But in the context of why Hackett had even come to her before Eden Prime – this whole Spectre gambit - it made no sense. If the Alliance truly wanted to fully come into its own under the Council's aegis, with a Spectre in the Division, maybe a seat on the Council, then this kind of wild provocation was, well, was liable to set back affairs decades.

Yet, taken into context with the rest. Hackett brought a dreadnought, a fleet task force to the Citadel to 'protect' Alice. She'd tried to argue that point: that there was nothing she could possibly have said, even half out of it and confused as she was that day that would've been a problem. She didn't remember the mission at all, so what had been so critical? Anderson had just said that Hackett had his reasons, and now it was clear.

Alice had nothing, yes. But she was visible and everyone, including the Council, was focusing on her, thinking she did.

And while they had eyes only for Lieutenant Commander Alice Shepard, Alliance Navy, the presence of a turian with a gunshot wound in a hospital on the wards wouldn't raise the tiniest bit of suspicion.

That's why she was in her whites, that's why Alenko was escorting her, that's why that's why that's why…

All to keep Kryick safe.

To note: Alice Shepard did not like being used. Of all the things left behind when she swore and oath, when the Alliance took her off Earth, that was one of the few pieces she kept. Alice Shepard was not a gamepiece, she was not a pawn, and she was not used. The anger didn't come, though, as she realized the scope of the Admiral's plan.

This game was quickly becoming something lightyears beyond what she was used to. The crap the gangs had done in New York? It had nothing on throwing around tens of thousands of sailors and marines, facing down intergalactic governments. Even her experience in the Navy. Taking charge of the scattered Alliance forces on Torfan's moon, her actions earlier in the Blitz. Commanding a few hundred, at most, in a limited theatre. For not the first time, she wondered exactly what the _hell_ the Admiral was thinking choosing her, of all people, for this.

She let Alenko get the double doors at the far side of the atrium, bracing herself for what was to be outside and -

Stepping outside was stepping into a wall of noise and she forced herself into it, not pausing or hesitating. Alenko leaned close, shouting over the cacophony.

' _Over there! Let's go!'_

She let him lead her down the steps from Huerta, barely able to take in the sudden vastness of space around her, the way the world bent upward, the explosions of light from omnitools and camera drones that packed the ground and sky around them. The point of stability were the seven matte black aircars waiting only a handful of meters away, and Alenko next to her.

The shouts, mixed and blended and overlaid, the shouts of ' _Commander!'_ and ' _Shepard!_ ' and ' _-about Eden Prime'_ and ' _Alliance warships'_ and ' _-so many dead'_ piled up and up, shaking loose the dust in her head and drawing snatched images of splattered gore across a dead city, a trillion throats screaming hoarse, bodies peeled back and brains blended, hands of night blotting out the stars-

The _thud_ of the door, reverberating through the thick cushion of the seat, cut off all noise, as stark a contrast as exiting Huerta.

Shepard let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, trying not to gasp in another for the burning in her lungs.

'They're a lot nastier in person. This would never have happened on Arcturus.' Alenko said, voice low.

She was both surprised and disturbed to find a lump in her throat, a burning behind her eyes, and she angrily swallowed both back, along with the short-lived snatches of her dreams.

'Jesus, they're like vultures.' She blinked hard, once, twice, glancing around the quiet, darkened interior of the aircar. Outside the crowd was peculiarly muted, held at a cordon of metal fencing and bright holograms. The cabin was blocked off, the driver invisible in the front, while only she and Alenko were in the passenger compartment.

Grateful to have no one else around, she noticed Alenko was in his omnitool, already tapping away, orange glow catching the angles of his face in the dim interior.

'I guess that's was something we learned back during First Contact, huh? That news media is the same everywhere.' Alenko noted, punching a couple buttons.

'Yeah. If anyone tries to say aliens are so different from we are, just point to their lawyers and reporters. Bad luck for me. Straight to the Embassy from here?' As if on cue, the aircar rumbled, a short vibration running through the frame telltale of mass effect cores. She felt the curious lift in her stomach that accompanied mass manipulation, and through the tinted windows, she saw the crowds drop away as they gained height.

'Straight to the Embassy. It's a shame these windows are so dark. You've never seen the Citadel, have you?' Shepard shook her head, leaning closer to peer up and out.

'Just in pictures.' She swallowed again, breathing back to normal, and mentally grabbed herself and pushed her focus at the Citadel. Worlds of ash and blood forgotten. The blinds had been permanently drawn on her suite in Huerta. Anderson had said it was about keeping paparazzi at bay, but she knew the real reasons. Someone had wanted Kryick dead, and if that someone _was_ this Saren then for all they knew, there was a bullet with her name on it pointed at the window of Huerta every second of the day. Especially considering the Admiral and Anderson had been setting things up like she was the primary piece in the game. She'd asked Anderson about some unobtrusive mass effect barriers. You know, just a generator or two, she wasn't asking for the world, just some anti-armor rated barriers.

A get-well gift.

According to the Council and the Ambassador's office, it would be both diplomatically offensive to imply there was even a whit of danger on the Citadel, and apparently _culturally_ offensive to the turians who prided themselves on being the peacekeepers and protectors of Council space.

She'd suggested that getting her brains splattered across the walls was probably offensive too, and Udina had glared at her. She'd only met him once, during the little impromptu pre-discharge meeting she had with Anderson the day before. A very impromptu meeting of course, which is why Udina was there with papers for her to sign and with a military issue camera drone.

Completely impromptu.

Udina hadn't impressed her. He'd seemed out of his depth, which struck her as exactly the wrong way for a career diplomat to be in this situation.

She mentally shook herself. The Citadel. Take a minute, Alice. Enjoy the ride. Appreciate where you are.

* * *

The Citadel!

The heart of Council space, and as some would try to sell you, the heart of the Galaxy itself. More important than any homeworld; more vital than any planet-bound metropolis. Thirteen million filled its vertical cityscapes, all going about their lives on a station that redefined the term. Built by the protheans, the ancient precursor race whose ruins dotted the galaxy. Filled with mysteries that a thousand years couldn't unlock.

The empty, welcoming home to all the travelers amongst the stars.

Except, of course, that it was too welcoming. She took in the view of the Presidium, the hub-ring of the Citadel, from which the five petals projected like a flower shod in steel, and couldn't help but feel a little unnerved.

Arcturus had the same upward-curving horizon, the same artificial sky, the same gardens and pavilions and mezzanines. Some had suggested the Alliance was overstepping itself with Arcturus, that the station was blatantly a young race's attempt to make itself seem important with a thin imitation of the Citadel. She'd laughed when she first heard that – the Alliance without Arcturus was unimaginable. Alice couldn't imagine how the Navy could service the fleets without the hundreds of square kilometers of bays and gantries that orbited Arcturus, that were built into it. But for all the potential political intention of Arcturus it felt alive in the way the Citadel did not – the aircars cut over a meandering river, and the sense that it was simply suffering their presence was overpowering. Everything was subtly wrong on the Citadel, the niggling feeling in Huerta slowly unpacking with a vertigo-inducing regularity. The scale was off, doorways slightly too large or wide, ceilings that did not appear to made with any modern species in mind. She saw expanses of smooth, unblemished metal, like plazas that simply had nothing. Like they were waiting for someone else to decide what to do with them, but ready to be wiped clean for the next peoples to claim the Citadel.

The Citadel, as best as she could decide, watching a statue of a Krogan, an enormous, polished-brass thing that was entirely out of place on the pedestal not designed for it slide past, was eerie.

Almost like she could just unfocus her eyes, let them slide over and block out the view of mezzanines and storefronts and she would see –

Empty. Empty, echoing halls. Rooms upon rooms upon rooms, waiting and hungry. Corridors that led nowhere. Winding passages that spoke of the trails of synapses and neurons. Gay fountains and canals without a hint of life in them, and not a soul to enjoy them. There were no turians, no asari or salarians, no hunched elcor or doddering volus. The Citadel was empty, hollow, and it whispered low promises into the silent stars.

She opened her eyes and there was the statue of the Krogan, going past. There were the other aircar lanes, light with traffic, above. There were the speckles of aliens going about their business.

She blinked, and the emptiness was gone.

The hairs on her neck prickled, a sudden wash of gooseflesh pimpling her arms.

'This place gives me the creeps.' Alenko tossed her a glance, momentarily distracted from his omnitool.

'The Citadel? Why? It reminded me of Arcturus. It _is_ a lot bigger, of course. And all the aliens.'

'I don't know.' She watched two cargo lifters pass above them, briefly tossing the convoy into shadow. 'Just something about it. I wonder what it felt like for the first asari and salarian explorers. When it was all empty.' She imagined the echoing emptiness, lights dim and muted, every footfall ringing in a space that seemed outside time.

'Probably eerie.' Alenko conceded, and snapped his omnitool off. 'We'll be at the Embassy long enough to meet with Anderson and Udina, but he just sent me a heads up – we need to get you in the same room as our wildcard. There's some things that have to be done in person.'

'And ah, what deck is he shuffled into?' Mentally she cursed Anderson for that fucking metaphor, since Alenko had been apparently instructed or ordered to keep it up.

'There's a medical centre on Tayseri Ward, with a wing set aside for Alliance use. Human doctors here on the Citadel for xenobiology training, things like that. We actually pulled a couple off to check on you. He's tucked in there, labelled as private security involved in a shootout with Blue Suns.'

'There's Suns on the Citadel?'

It seemed almost ridiculous, and it struck her that after two weeks of watching the Council pile shit on the Alliance, downplay the loss of lives, two weeks of watching how the universe really is the same everywhere, she still had that little nugget of an idea that the Citadel really might be the beacon it was supposed to be. A little smile crossed her lips, unnoticed by her or Alenko.

'Suns, Blood Pack, Eclipse, you name it. All the major mercenary groups have a presence, and it's mostly legal.'

'You know, none of this was in the briefings the Admiral sent me on my tour of the Alliance with.'

'Sorry, Commander. I know you've never really been outside Alliance space. It's not really that important, which is why it wouldn't have been in there. I guess it was assumed you'd hear from Kryick. The groups have a legal presence here, since they're regarded more as corporate entities by the Republics and the Hierarchy. But there usually isn't much that goes on that's serious: they save that stuff for the Traverse and Terminus. Citadel is all, well…'

'It's white collar crime.'

'Something like that.'

'What about poorer districts? Citadel have any slums?'

'Not as you'd know them, Commander.' He, like anyone else, would know Alice Shepard hailed from New York, one of the poorest and hardest cities on Earth. Nothing beyond that, but he wasn't wrong. 'Minimum wage on the Citadel is enough for luxury on Earth, but everything's more expensive here to match it. But no slums, the Keepers are too efficient at keeping everything in order and running. And C-Sec is thorough in keeping the image up. Or, well. That's what the story is.' He gave her a meaningful look.

'Okay. Okay. So our wildcard is in Tayseri with a reasonable cover story. There's mercs here on official business, which means S-, ah, our _friend_ from Eden Prime has his personal choice at ways to get guns on us. Y'know, Lieutenant, all this is making me wish for a couple corridors with batarian pirates at the other end. And a Lancer. That was simple.' She sighed, and glanced out the window again as the pitch of the engines shifted lower.

Alenko was quiet, attentive and waiting for her to continue. She sized him up, considering. He was a good officer – in the few times she'd worked with him in the past he impressed her, and she appreciated his professionalism. 'You've been by a lot, and Anderson has been tight-lipped about what I can and can't do right now, so how about this, Lieutenant. Admiral Hackett told me I can have whatever I want, so I'm going to steal you from wherever you're assigned. Detached to the Embassy, I assume? You're detached to me now. I'll let Anderson know and he can figure things out. You know more about the Citadel than I do, and I know through the Combat Biotic Symposiums you've had more time to interact with aliens in ways other than shooting at them. Consider yourself drafted to my inner circle. If there is some kind of group out there that's trying to isolate the Alliance, no matter who it's after…well, I can guess where the Admiral is going to be sending me. And I'll need people with me, people I can trust.'

To his credit, his only response was a slightly raised eyebrow and a salute, made ironic in their seated positions.

'That's more than you've said to me at once in two weeks, ma'am. I don't think Captain Anderson will disagree, and he's more or less given me leave for this anyway. If you asked.'

'He was expecting this, wasn't he.' She shook her head, and snorted.

'Maybe.'

'Okay then, Lieutenant,' the aircar vibrated as it set down, and the engine started to whine down. She saw armed and uniformed MPs approach from the façade of the Embassy, reaching for her door. 'Let's get started.'

* * *

 _ **Author's Note**_

 _Hey._

 _So it's been a couple months._

 _I've actually been sitting on this chapter for the better part of two months now, in pieces, as I decided if I liked it, hated it, or just felt indifferent. Ultimately, I decided on 'mostly like it, slightly indifferent', and figured that it's better to get it out there and move the story along than continue flailing about. This is about practice and testing myself, and I've discovered that dialogue is not exactly my strong suit. I tend to write a lot more internalized stories. This is something I shall keep in mind._

 _Thanks to my beta, Clockwise02, who I actually had read this chapter before I put it up, unlike last one. Generally what beta readers are for. He's been invaluable for bouncing ideas off of and developing stuff for this fic, as we're both big fans of the setting, even if the franchise got a bit...funky._

 _Not much happens here, this is more dedicated to world building and character establishment, and yes, functionally, it was seven thousand words to leave a hospital room. Whoops. Things will be speeding up, and quickly, as shit is predictably about to kick off. We've all played Mass Effect, so we're all little future seers who knows what's right around the corner, regardless of how much I alter and adjust the setting and story._

 _Speaking of, you can definitely see more deviations here. Earth is shittier than in ME - I'm generally going by ME1 Codex rather than any others, since ME1 still had the sort of nobledark/grimbright feel still, before we became turbo generic boring scifi in ME2 and 3. So Earth is very divided amongst the very rich and very poor, the Second American Civil War did some serious nasties across the North American Continent, and other countries did not make it through the 2000s and 2100s without significant change. I'm considering doing Codex sections at the end of each chapter like I've seen other authors do, but I fear with my propensity to write essay length Author's Notes this could get unwieldy. Perhaps special chapters. We'll see._

 _Anyway, Echo still lives, hooray, and I have very solid plans for the next chapter and will likely already be writing it by later tonight. As always, I still hold to my promises as an FF author: I will never just vanish. As long as there is no special chapter announcing that Echo is cancelled, The Game Will Go On. I will never just vanish, on my honor as a son of asuryan._

 _That's about it, so thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'd love for reviews and feedback, it's always nice to see._

 _Until next time, I'll be polishing spiritstones and condescending to ynnari;_

the bonesinger of yme-loc


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